You gotta hand it to these early Stockton art collectors

It's the hand of a mummy, chopped off in Egypt, brought here by a Stockton banker and stored in the basement of The Haggin Museum, where they're not sure what to do with it.

"What were they thinking?" Haggin CEO Tod Ruhstaller asked of his predecessors. "What would have compelled them to accept this?"

Early Stocktonian Henry Hewlett, president of First National Bank, and his wife, Eva, bought the hand on a trip to Egypt in 1881.

"This is supposed to be the hand of one of the Egyptian queens of the 18th dynasty, 1500 years B.C., taken from the tombs at Thebes," Hewlett wrote.

The Hewletts displayed the hand in the parlor of their Oak Street home. When they died, relatives handed it off to The Haggin.

The iffy artifact has been in storage for decades.

In honor of this item, the hand will be displayed in the McKee Room for a couple weeks. There you can see The Haggin's outstanding orientalist paintings, if you want to stay with the Middle East theme.